In most industries in which technicians are dispatched to field locations to provide services to customers, their supervisors are available in home offices to provide them with support, coordinate projects, and perform various office transactions. The supervisors have access in their offices to a number of resources, including various legacy systems, a company intranet, e-mail accounts, the Internet, and the like. Through these resources, the supervisors can perform various transactions, including those associated with the supervision of the technicians. For example, a supervisor may use a dispatch system, which is one of the resources, to determine which technician is closest to a particular field location.
The dispatch system and all such resources become unavailable to the supervisor when the supervisor himself is in the field. The supervisor may be in the field to respond to customer calls, provide training to new technicians, attend meetings, or for other reasons. As the resources are unavailable to him while he is on the road, the supervisor's ability to supervise his technicians becomes severely challenged. Currently, the supervisor must rely on someone else, perhaps another supervisor who is in the office, to obtain the needed information from the office resources.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing a known method for a supervisor to obtain information from the resources in the office while the supervisor is away from the office. Supervisor 110 is at a field location away from the office at which dispatch system 152 is located. Supervisor 110 needs to know the whereabouts of technician 160. Supervisor 110 uses communications device 120, e.g., a wireless telephone, to call maintenance center 150. During a voice communications session via communication network 130, a colleague of supervisor 110 at maintenance center 150 obtains the name of technician 160 from supervisor 110. The colleague then consults dispatch system 152 from which information associated with technician 160 is obtained. The information may include, for example, the last dispatch time, the GPS coordinates of technician 160's current location, how many jobs technician 160 has been scheduled to perform that day, and so on. The colleague then conveys the information to supervisor 110 during the voice communications session.
On any given day, maintenance center 150 may be flooded with calls from supervisor 110 and hundreds of other supervisors attempting to obtain similar or the same information from dispatch system 152. Thus, the known method often results in significant time wasted by supervisor 110 and his colleagues. This known method is therefore highly inefficient. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method that would enable supervisor 110 to access resources in the office directly.